Our global network comprises leading companies and researchers in care of the elderly. By leveraging this combined expertise and evaluating products and ideas in a home-like environment, can we shorten the time from idea to market launch.

A common platform

The successful development of a new healthcare product requires a platform where developers and users can meet. Researchers and innovators need regular contact with each other and with those giving and receiving care. Ängen Research and Innovation offers unique opportunities to drive development forward and get prototypes tested by real users in a home-like environment.

Ongoing Projects

Ängen FoI operates several spearhead projects supported by both the EU and Swedish national funding. Some of the projects are in a basic idea phase, while others are close to launching the market.

E-care@home

E-care@home aims to develop sensor networks for domestic use which collect information on behaviors and health status. Such a sensor network could be useful for, e.g., elderly and others with special needs.

RobotEra

The purpose of the RobotEra project is to develop, implement and evaluate the use of robotics in real life conditions. The project wants to find out both the technical efficiency and the social and legal aspects of the user. We allow people in real environments to interact with complex systems of advanced robotics services to investigate whether they can increase the quality of life and efficiency of elderly care.

Reground

Reground – Relational symbol grounding through affordance learning The problem of symbol grounding attempts to associate symbols from language with a corresponding referent in the environment.Traditionally, research has focused on identifying single objects and their properties. Similarly, affordances learning in robotics tend to focus on single objects. These approaches often do not consider the full context of the environment, which contains multiple different objects and their properties as well as relationships among the objects. Furthermore, the state of the environment (e.g., which relationships are true, etc.) affords (i.e., permits executing) certain actions. This project hypothesizes that the grounding process must consider the full context of the environment in order to perform symbol grounding and to better adapt to a new language and a new environment.

This project aims to develop a novel approach to grounding that lifts it to the relational level, where an agent reasons about the relationships between multiple symbols in the language and between multiple referents in the environment and it is able to learn affordances that capture the relationship between objects and their properties, actions, and the environment. Learning such relationships will require combining information from different modalities such as language and perception. We will evaluate our approach with a robot that operates in a kitchen-like environment. The robot will be trained by being presented with a series of demonstrations involving inputs from multiple modalities (language and perception). Then, it will be evaluated by being placed in an unseen environment where it will be forced to adapt to its new setting and interpret, possibly unimodal input (i.e., only language or only perception), in order to correctly carry out the requested tasks.

Test bed Older and disabled

Test bed Elderly and disabled work for smart technical solutions that allow the elderly and disabled to stay longer in the home environment while maintaining independence and integrity. In the test bed we open up and enable testing of innovations and smart solutions / products that will help the elderly and disabled. Solutions and ideas should originate from end users’ needs and / or problems encountered in their daily lives.

Test bed Elderly and disabled is a collaboration between Örebro Municipality, Region Örebro County and Alfred Nobel Science Park.

Giraffe Plus

GiraffPlus is a complex system that can monitor activities using a network of sensors, both on the body and in and around the home. The sensors can measure, for example, blood pressure or detect if anybody falls.

Visit us!

The Ängen Research and Innovation apartment is located in close proximity to end-users. You can find us at Ängen (Hälsans hus) on Landbotorps allé 17E in Örebro.
Welcome to book a visit by sending an e-mail to: angen@oru.se

Calendar

VIEWINGS

Available visit times:
View to the public, Thursday 8/1, 13.30-15.00
OBS! The view starts at 13.30.
Book by email to angen@oru.se and make sure you are there on time.